How do you think conservative talk radio has affected the Legislature's work?

The Republicans were essentially threatened and terrorized against voting for revenue. Now [some] are facing recalls. They operate under a terrorist threat: "You vote for revenue and your career is over." I don't know why we allow that kind of terrorism to exist. I guess it's about free speech, but it's extremely unfair.

Love it. Exercising your constitutional right to remove an elected official with which you disagree is "terrorism" and "career-ending" -- but destroying a private individual's business and career over a political donation is perfectly OK with Karen Bass and the Obama Party.

Friday, June 26, 2009

Jenny Sanford said Thursday that her husband Mark Sanford's political career is "not a concern of mine" and that she'd be just fine -- regardless of whether their marriage survives.

"His career is not a concern of mine," she told reporters as she departed the family's vacation home in Sullivan's Island, South Carolina. "He's going to have to worry about that. I'm worried about my family and the character of my children."

She added that she would be fine, with or without her husband.

"I have great faith and great friends and great family. We have a good Lord in this world and I know that I'm going to be fine and not only will I survive, I'll thrive," she said.

"I don't know if he'll be with me, but I'm going to do my best to work on my marriage because I believe in marriage. I believe in raising good kids is the most important thing in the world," she said.

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris' office on Monday defended allowing about a half dozen first-time drug offenders to clear their records by going through a job-training program, even after prosecutors learned they were deportable as undocumented immigrants.

But Harris' aides said they have since made changes in the program that would prevent a recurrence of instances in which illegal immigrants got their criminal records cleared by going through the Back on Track jobs program, which trains offenders for jobs that undocumented immigrants legally would be prevented from holding.

But wait, there's more!

Harris was quoted in the Times as saying that enforcing federal immigration law was not the job of local authorities. The district attorney was explaining how her office handled the case of Alexander Izaguirre, an illegal immigrant from Honduras who had been enrolled in the Back on Track program in July when he allegedly robbed a woman of her purse in Pacific Heights, then got into an SUV that drove into the victim.

Again, given Obama Kamala's past record, this is not a surprise to anyone; it merely has become a question of just how far off a rocker one can go.

Sunday, June 07, 2009

After three years of habitation here, you get used to people who know you and your opinions opining how anyone to the right of Bill Ayers can possibly live in San Francisco.

The answer: A faith in the inherent good nature and rebelliousness of people who fully realize and are used to the fact they're living under a completely-dysfunctional totalitarian state constructed on screwball ideology and run by nitwits. Sort of like Das Kapital meets A Night at the Opera.

He sleeps under a bridge, washes in a public bathroom and was panhandling for booze money 11 months ago, but now Larry Moore is the best-dressed shoeshine man in the city. When he gets up from his cardboard mattress, he puts on a coat and tie. It's a reminder of how he has turned things around.

In fact, until last week it looked like Moore was going to have saved enough money to rent a room and get off the street for the first time in six years. But then, in a breathtakingly clueless move, an official for the Department of Public Works told Moore that he has to fork over the money he saved for his first month's rent to purchase a $491 sidewalk vendor permit.....

Moore is nothing if not dutiful. He attempted to work his way through the byzantine city government channels, although he didn't get much help.

"I guess my gripe is that when the city came by and told him to get his papers in order but couldn't tell him how to do it," said Travis See, who manages the Custom Shop Clothiers on the corner of Market and New Montgomery. "This lady couldn't even tell him which building to go to so he could stand in line and waste all day."

Larry Moore shined so many shoes on Thursday that he ran through two bottles of polish.

Then there were the women who walked up to give him a hug, the tourists who had their photo taken with him, and the people - more than one - who stuffed $100 bills in his shirt pocket.

"Honestly," Moore said, "it is probably the best day of my life. And not for financial reasons. It just means so much to have people come out and recognize someone working hard."

Now we just have to work on the general realization that our main control on this system is failing to re-elect the idiot politicians who appoint, employ, otherwise protect, and receive generous campaign contributions from the dimbulb city employees who cause these sort of problems.

Blogger Ed Whelan at The Corner offers an explanation for his behavior in outing an anonymous blogger that has to be described in only one word: "Obamaesque".

Excuse #1: "Nobody needs to be pseudonymous."

A blogger may choose to blog under a pseudonym for any of various self-serving reasons, from the compelling (e.g., genuine concerns about personal safety) to the respectable to the base. But setting aside the extraordinary circumstances in which the reason to use a pseudonym would be compelling, I don’t see why anyone else has any obligation to respect the blogger’s self-serving decision.

With this much projection, Whelan needs to be opening a movie theater.

For some reason, despite the clear and present danger that this blogger's anonymity presents, in Whelan's opinion, the person has managed to blog for years without anyone else engaging in the same sort of e-stalking that Whelan has done. Did Whelan bother to postulate why so many other people were content to live and let live?

Excuse #2: "He's a hypocrite."

Blevins desired to be unaccountable—irresponsible—for the views he set forth in the blogosphere. He wanted to present one face to his family, friends, and colleagues and another to the blogosphere.

Based, of course, on Whelan's exhaustive analysis and Cerebro scans that says the blogger has never actually told anyone else about their blog.

The irony of this is that these kind of outings are self-fulfilling prophecies; people blog pseudononymously because they don't want their families, friends, and jobs involved in online arguments, and then people like Whelan go right ahead and drag their families, friends, and jobs into these things.

Why? Well, that leads us to Excuse #3: "It's HIS fault!"

If he wanted to avoid the risk of being associated publicly with his views, he shouldn’t have blogged.

Sure. And if people didn't want their employers picketed, their churches vandalized, or white powder mailed to their offices, they shouldn't have donated to organizations that were against Proposition 8.

This really is what puts the godawful stink on this whole process. Whelan has inadvertently made it clear that his whole point in doing this is to create problems for the blogger with said blogger's "family, friends, and colleagues". This has nothing to do with what was said; this has everything to do with creating trouble outside the blogosphere for someone who disagrees with you with the sole intent of getting them to stop doing whatever it is with which you disagree by hurting them somehow.

That isn't honest dialogue; it's hostage taking.

This blog exists primarily because of my utter revulsion and disgust for people who engage in this sort of behavior. Ed Whelan is now among them.

Along similar lines, I'm linking Little Miss Attila's post because a) she's in California, b) she qualifies as a Talented, Sexy, and Beautiful Straight Woman Who Blogs, and 3) she has a gun and knows how to use it.